


Intellectual Investigations on the Topic of Sexual Interest by Jonathan ‘Jon’ Sims | The Asexual

by interropunct



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, F/M, Internalized Acephobia, M/M, Past Georgie Barker/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Sex-Repulsed Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:35:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28737351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/interropunct/pseuds/interropunct
Summary: Jon has been thinking there was something wrong with him for a long time. He needs the right kind of help to accept that there isn't.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 22
Kudos: 126
Collections: Aspec Archives Week





	Intellectual Investigations on the Topic of Sexual Interest by Jonathan ‘Jon’ Sims | The Asexual

**Author's Note:**

> This is for Aspec Archives Week over on Tumblr, but not specifically for any one prompt. It's kind of a Jon character study (I know this fandom already has a million of these AND IT'LL HAVE AT LEAST ONE MORE). I just wanted to write a sex repulsed Jon and his dealings with internalized aphobia through the years. Also featuring an ambiguously ace/aspec Martin!
> 
> **Warnings** for internalized aphobia (like a lot of it), some incomplete and misunderstood online resources on asexuality, mentions of gender dysphoria and internalized transphobia, mention of masturbation, nudity (but no sex), and a brief moment of a sex repulsed character pushing at their own boundaries in a kind of unhealthy way.
> 
> Thanks so much to Dathen and idigtheburied for sensitivity reading and beta-ing. Any remaining issues are my own.

As a teenager, Jon had thought something was wrong with him for many reasons. He didn’t do “girlhood” correctly. He didn’t like Barbies or makeup, didn’t have a boyfriend or a first kiss. He certainly didn’t want to have sex. Teen TV dramas and his peers and the occasional romance novel his grandmother carelessly included all made it abundantly clear that this meant there was something deeply wrong with him.

It didn’t really bother him. Seeing the other kids at school posture and boast and waste so much energy on sex and relationships, he thought maybe he’d gotten lucky to avoid it all. 

But as he grew older the imaginary clock began to tick, counting up from some “normal” time when he should have lost his virginity or had a relationship or any of it. Every day that passed where he was an adult with no experience to speak of was a sign that something was clearly wrong.

And then uni, and the revelation of gender and queerness. He’d thought, briefly, that now he’d solved it. The issue was clear: he wasn’t a girl and therefore all the sex and romance hadn’t appealed because it had been the type that girls got. He tried dating. Georgie, as first girlfriends went, was excellent. He loved her for her easy acceptance of his gender, regardless of how feminine he still looked to himself in the mirror.

But her support did not overwrite his own view of himself and the newly acknowledged dysphoria was intense.

That was probably why, he reasoned, he still found himself shying away from having sex with her. Sex still wasn’t something he was interested in seeking it out, and when Georgie suggested it he found the idea as uncomfortable as ever. He told Georgie it was the dysphoria. He wasn’t sure if it was true, or just an easier excuse: for her, for himself.

The two of them grew apart, broke up, left uni. Not exactly in that order.

Jon, without the outlet of mad revising sessions, found himself falling down different sorts of rabbit holes. Researching almost manically some statement at work, a piece of trivia Sasha mentioned, what on earth could be wrong with him.

He found the word there, at the bottom of a trail of clicked links and skimmed articles: “asexual”. “Definition: having no sexual attraction to others, or a lack of desire for sex.” The second half, certainly was true for Jon, the first half just confused him. Reading a separate definition of “attraction” and “sexual attraction” was also unhelpful. Sexual attraction was wanting to have sex with someone. But as the first article had said, asexual people could and did still have sex. He closed the tabs with vicious precision. How dare the world provide answers but not understanding.

The articles had been clear about one thing: there was nothing wrong with it. It was not a medical condition, it was not something that had to be “fixed.” That was good, wonderful, a relief, of course. 

But Jon found it hard to accept. That what he had always seen as wrong with him was, according to people much more well-informed than him, not wrong at all. It was a mental exercise he grappled with, trying to see it like gender, as value neutral, just something else about his identity that did not need to be solved but merely respected.

He started testosterone, finally, after working at the Magnus Institute for almost 8 months, nearly two full years since he’d started the gender clinic ball rolling. Took bloody long enough.

He had researched the process to death, so when he started actually taking hormones he did not expect any surprises. While increased sexual appetites were common, Jon knew he didn’t have any appetite to increase. He supposed in this, as in simpler equations, doubling zero would still be zero.

The fact that it took only a few months before he found himself thinking about sex all the time was a shock. The word itself, the surprise of it, the nebulous frustration, everything about being “horny” was entirely unnecessary and unpleasant. Asexuality was a lack of desire for sex. But how then, he worried, could he be now very much desiring _something_ at all hours of the day and night? The fact that he could be doing even this, even asexuality, wrong frustrated him almost to tears.

But he caved and bought a vibrator and had many pleasant orgasms, and was somewhat satisfied. He had fantasies. He would find himself daydreaming about sex, about how different it was said to be, when the person touching you was not yourself. A man smiling at a baby, a woman scrunching her mouth as she put on makeup on the tube, was all it would take for Jon to start creating elaborate scenarios of imagined intimacy with someone who’s face he couldn’t even recall by the evening. But when he tried to fit a real person into that imagination, tried to take it from fantasy into plan, it always felt… off. What was _wrong_ with him?

Maybe, he speculated, it had nothing to do with sexual desire. Maybe asexuality was another convenient excuse, but really he was just scared—to let someone that close. Yes, he thought, that could be it. To be that vulnerable in front of someone. He wasn’t sure he could do it, wasn’t sure if he wanted to. 

He tried giving it another go. Before hormones and top surgery, before the ache of parting from Georgie, Jon hadn’t really known himself. He hadn’t known how to begin feeling comfortable in his skin. But now, _now_ , maybe he would be able to do it. Maybe he could go to a club and chat someone up and not feel his insides curl into little sharp knots when they put their hand on his elbow. After all, if it is was fear of vulnerability, rather than asexuality, there were all kinds of ways of doing sex that weren’t as vulnerable emotionally.

He was overwhelmed by noise and light and scents the instant he stepped foot in the club. Could hardly chat someone up here unless they were both willing to yell into each other’s ears. But Jon grit his teeth long enough to make eye contact with a woman who he decided would do just fine.

She had dyed hair and three piercings and a crooked smile and yes it was a stereotype but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t have a problem with his genital configuration.

He got as far as the cab ride to her flat and a rather sloppy open-mouthed kiss—surely only unpleasant due to his lack of experience—before backing out. The cab stopped outside her building and in the endless few seconds of the idling engine he tried to imagine getting undressed in front of this woman, having her touch him or he her. Tried to picture the coming tableaux they would make and it was a deeply strange and rather uncomfortable thought. He couldn’t bring himself to try anyway. He apologized to the woman and paid the cabbie to drive him alone all the way back to his flat.

Perhaps he was just a coward, afraid of the unknown. Or maybe something was still wrong then. The same wrong, the wrong that wasn’t truly wrong, if he could just trust his research rather than his gut.

Jon was 35 years old and he had never had sex. And somehow there was nothing wrong with that.

Fine, he decided. He was asexual, perhaps aromantic as well. 

He had loved Georgie, but had he been _in love_ with her? Asexual people, as Jon had read, could and did have sex with their partners, to please them. Jon hadn’t even particularly enjoyed kissing, beyond passing pecks. Georgie had respected that, said some people just weren’t really fans of make outs, it happens, nothing to worry about. Was that a sign, Jon thought, that he’d never really loved her “like that?”

On the other hand, he was drawn in some way to men sometimes, and women at others, and more than a few non-binary people. He went on dates—even if only a first or occasionally second one—with all sorts. Ergo, he thought: he was bi, pan, something of that nature.

But he didn’t fall for any of them, didn’t even feel much of anything for them besides occasionally getting another loose friendship out of it. Back to the aromantic hypothesis.

And he certainly didn’t feel the urge to sleep with any of them. Asexual then, surely. 

Or perhaps option D. All of the above. That was possible, wasn’t it? He wasn’t precisely sure he liked that answer, but it fit. He could live with it.

35 years old and his whole experience of sex and sexuality, love and intimacy, amounted to that insipid Facebook status: “It’s complicated.”

The promotion to head archivist, when it came, was jarring. Everything that came after, even moreso. And life was weird and weirder, then awful and awful-er. Wrong the likes of which Jon could not comprehend. Until suddenly he could, until suddenly he was the same breed. 

It happened slowly, having so much of what he considered to be Jonathan Sims coming to be utterly tied up with impossible fear gods and the end of the world.

And then abruptly he woke up and wasn’t human anymore.

Being a monster, an actual monster, made it abundantly clear to Jon that nothing had really been wrong with him before. What was sex or the lack of it, desire or the unfulfillment of it, compared to literally nourishing himself off the fear of innocents? And now, he thought, what was the point of contemplating human things like warm feelings and intimacy, when he was never going to have any of that again?

It was dark, for a while there. Not all dark, perhaps, with Daisy, and with Melanie’s escape, but not any impression there would be a coming dawn.

And of course, even in the ugly reality of his new life, there was Martin.

Martin who he cared for in a way he hadn’t known he could. Martin who he would gladly live in shared darkness with for the rest of his life, if they could just agree to escape.

Killing Peter Lucas was objectively a monstrous act. But when Martin looked _at_ Jon finally—not through him—he couldn’t believe he’d been wrong to do it.

And now, there was perhaps still no dawn, no real escape. But there was a fire in the night, and a cabin with a candle in the window and inside was Martin, and Jon had never been so gladly drawn in.

He loved Martin. It was a truth that was so fundamental even through the long nights of his deepest monsterhood as to not require contemplation. It simply was. Now he had Martin next to him, could touch, could kiss, could say every single day “I love you” and hear it back.

It was simultaneously comforting, heartening, soul-soothing, and completely terrifying.

He’d loved Martin for so long that to have him near felt impossible even as it was happening. He could tell that Martin felt the same way, whether because of the Lonely’s remaining influence, or some other reason.

They touched each other with care. Held hands, tentative in grip. Leaned against each other, but not too heavily. Kissed with closed mouths and their overwhelmed and happy tears blended together where their cheeks brushed.

There were many things wrong in the world, but their love was not one of them.

Jon felt so safe with Martin. So heart-stoppingly in love with him. This must be romantic love, Jon was all but sure. Any doubt was epistemological rather than emotional.

Martin never asked about sex. Never made Jon feel uncomfortable, even when he took long showers and Jon could guess but refused to Know what was happening in there. Jon was grateful for Martin’s diplomacy but eventually curiosity began to eek out fear as the top emotion when he thought about him and sex and Martin.

Finally he asked. They discussed it but Jon had to say over and over: he didn’t know. He didn’t know how he’d react. He didn’t know what he wanted or what his boundaries were or what he was doing with any of this. He didn’t know, and ultimately he wanted to. Jon wondered if having sex with Martin could be a revelation the way that love for Martin was. He wanted to test the hypothesis.

Jon is naked and under the covers, and somehow the nakedness is terrifying in its completeness even as it’s functionally not even nakedness. Martin is still sitting on the other side of the bed, removing his socks. He turns around and Jon registers that he’s beautiful. Fat and hairy and gorgeous. The same beloved Martin that Jon could stare at for hours, but now there’s more to see.

He gets under the covers too. Their bare knees brush but nothing else. Martin is looking nervous, but with a careful veneer over the top, as though it will hide the anxiety.

“You’re beautiful.” Jon says, honest and uncomplicated. Martin looks to one side, pinches his mouth in a little complicated smile, visibly composes himself. Looks at Jon softly, and now there’s so much less of the nervousness in his eyes.

“Thank you,” he mumbles, and Jon loves him more than he can stand. Then, “Are you ready?”

“Yes.” 

“And you know-”

“Yes, I know I can back out at any time. Yes, I know we don’t have to do this. I know, Martin.” Martin is grinning at him wryly. “I also know I love you.”

“I love you too,” he says, and scoots closer until they’re pressed together. Lips brushing and bodies meeting.

Jon’s first instinct is to run. The terror and unease is so strong he has to get out.

His second instinct is to smother his first into nothingness. It is stubbornness, and helpless desire to please, and fear too of what the first instinct means if he lets it live.

The second one reigns for a whole five seconds, as Martin (beloved Martin) runs a hand (warm and gentle) up Jon’s side (non-erogenous, simple) and by the time Martin’s hand reaches Jon’s face a third instinct has won out.

He rolls away, onto his back, until they are not touching anywhere but where Jon’s hand grips Martin’s too tight. He sobs once, and then tears.

“Jon, can you tell me what’s happening right now?” His voice is careful, only the barest bits of smothered terror leaking through.

“I can’t. I can’t do it.”

“Can’t tell me what’s happening?”

“No,” Jon almost snaps, “I can’t have sex with you, Martin. I want to. God I want to want to. But I- I can’t.” Martin squeezes Jon’s had reassuringly, maybe a calming gesture but Jon is still barreling down the train of thought. “I love you, so so much, and I’ve thought about it, always thought that maybe if I found the right person then it would just work, everything would make sense. And you’re the right person, Martin, in every single way, but I still can’t. It still doesn’t feel right, not even to make you happy or for the sake of being close to you. And,” Jon sniffs, noisy and gross, tears still flowing as he finally lets his head turn back toward Martin. “I know the last thing you’d ever want me to do is push through it.” Martin nods, expression emphatic and supportive, and let’s go of their joined hands just so he can carefully stroke a hand through Jon’s hair. “I just, I don’t know that anything is going to change this, to fix it, no matter how much I might want to. And I know,” he cuts Martin off as his mouth opens to object to this last statement. “I know this doesn’t change anything for you, I know and I actually believe you. But…” Jon closes his eyes. “it feels like I’ve lost something. Some hope, some imagination that I’ve been holding onto for so long.” A shaky breath, finally winding down. “I’m never going to have sex.” With that last, he laughs wetly and throws his free hand up in some gesture he himself doesn’t understand.

It’s quiet then and he registers, or perhaps re-registers the gentle swipe of Martin’s thumb against his cheekbone. Back and forth and steady as a clock. Jon’s tears have stopped, although they still loom.

“Is it my turn now, or do you already know what I’m going to say?” It’s teasing, a little snotty, and it makes Jon laugh again, this time at himself.

“I mean I could probably guess,” Jon says, goading.

“Yeah, yeah,” playing at being put-upon, “well let me get a shot at it anyway.

“Jon, you are perfect and complete exactly as you are. And I for one, love you and want to be with you for the rest of my life even if we never kiss again, never see each other naked, never do anything in the least bit sexual. If you want to do some of those things _without_ the pressure of sex, we can do that. I’m happy to see what you want to do when there’s no question of sex being brought up. As much or as little physical, non-sexual intimacy as you want. And I don’t want to invalidate your feelings right now, but I have to say, you haven’t lost out on bloody anything. Sex is messy and awkward and usually not nearly as fun as it’s made out to be. You’re no more losing that potential experience than you’re losing the experience of… being a 14th century peasant!” This is where Jon begins to laugh in earnest, body bowing forward so his head brushes Martin’s collarbone as he continues. “No, listen! There were probably some cool things about being a peasant. That two-phase sleep business. Probably no asshole eldritch boss or, god- no dealing with the job market in general.” Jon’s eyes are leaking again, for a different reason. He can feel more than see Martin gesturing emphatically. “But! You might just die of the plague! So y’know it’s got its downsides, right?”

“Martin, let me, let me get this straight. Youre saying having sex is like dying of the plague?”

“All I’m saying,” Martin says, voice soft and a little crooked smile on his face now, “is you’re not missing out on anything, it’s just a different type of experience. It’s not pokemon, you don’t have to collect them all.”

“I must have missed the 14th century peasant pokemon.”

The tension, the awful crushing ache behind his ribcage, is gone. The nakedness still feels a little weird, a little like Jon wants them both to have some underwear on. But it’s not terrifying. Where they touch is not charged and Jon is no longer tense. It’s just Jon, and just Martin. Them side by side, companionable, in love, having lost out on nothing.


End file.
